


the lowlight

by searwrites (sears)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Instant Connection, M/M, Sexual Content, driving au, handjobs, that way you get when your life is potentially changed by someone youve only known for a few hours, trigger warnings in notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:34:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2167689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sears/pseuds/searwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Anonymous said to searwrites:<br/>erejean where eren is trying to run from something(family, bad company etc)stops at a convience store/gas station asks jean(the clerk) if they have burners(cell phones so no one can find him but he can contact mikisa/armin or smth) and jean says no but eren really needs a burner yet has no car and the next place that would have them is wal-mart or smth and so he makes jean drive him there after he gets off shift. then jean somehow ends up running away with eren bc hes falls for him hard<3"</p><p>----</p><p>eren/jean | modern au where jean is a couple of years older than eren | warnings for mentions of smoking, ecigarettes, references to harder drugs, swearing, sexual content, hitchhiking, bullying, homophobic slurs, lashing out/violence, divorce, fast-moving relationship, sleep deprivation, minor character death mentioned | rated m, or something</p><p>i'm not sure if this was exactly what you were looking for, but i love this kind of prompt. the warnings probably make it sound more depressing than it is? i just love the idea of eren being an open book and jean being kind of a recluse/having low self esteem and being ripped out of that by meeting eren. </p><p>----</p>
            </blockquote>





	the lowlight

It’s getting to that real dead quiet time of Jean’s shift, where the slow trickle of cars out on the highway die out, and he can easily get away with checking his phone for extended periods of time. The rain outside isn’t heavy at all, just enough to hear the way it patters against the window and the concrete, but quiet enough to be almost calming, fogging the windows from the bottom up. The only other sounds are the hum of the slushie machine to his far left and then the muted buzzing from the fluorescent lights, so it’s a little alarming when the bell chimes from the door opening so suddenly.

In walks a kid, can’t be older than Jean, all bundled up in a faded black hoodie with a white cross on the left breast. Over the cross it says _‘modern life is war’_ in all caps. The kid shuffles in too quickly for Jean to get a good look at him, but he doesn’t look too out of the ordinary, just a hoodie, scuffed converse, jeans - what’s unusual is that this store is deserted on either side of it by a few miles each way, and the only way to get to it is by car, unless you feel like taking a nice 2am stroll along the highway.

Jean only watches him because he has nothing better to do, and his phone is running out of battery soon anyway. The kid looks kinda tweaky, nervous almost. He paces around the snack aisle, stops to ponder the stale pots of coffee that Jean refuses to restock at this hour, and then circles around the empty donuts cabinet and back to the snacks. After a once over of the whole fucking shop, apparently, he comes right up to the counter.

“Hey, man, you guys don’t sell burners here?”

He has black hair, beneath the hoodie. And dark eyes too, but not your typical _addicted-to-shit-that-requires-tinfoil_ dark, but like he was born with it.

“You mean like a lighter?” Jean asks.

“No, like. Cell phones? Like one time use, or those pay as you go things.”

The kid is full on gnawing on his lower lip now, his hands balled into fists in the pockets of his hoodie, pulling the actual hood around his face taut. Jean’s heart rate picks up, because what if this kid really is a waster? He’s asking for shit like one time use phones, and who says he doesn’t have a gun in those pockets? The 30 minutes training video they made him sit through somehow now seems wildly inadequate for actually dealing with a real life burglary.

“We don’t do phones here. There’s a payphone outside, if you need to use one,” Jean says, pointing out towards the fogged window to the left of the door. It’s plain as fucking day, so it clearly means this kid has no change on him, so he offers, “I can spot you some coins, if you need it.”

“No, shit, that won’t work,” the kid says, cursing out into the ether, turning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Jean feels less nervous now, like maybe the kid is just lost, but it seems like it’s more than that. “Where’s the nearest, like, Wal-mart or whatever?”

“‘Bout 5 miles down the road. You’re kinda out in the middle of nowhere right now.”

“Yeah, I gathered that. _Shit_.” He drags his hand over his head, musses his hair, and in the process pulls off his hoodie. His hair is nice - thick, and shiny, and somehow being exposed from beneath the hoodie his face looks infinitely more afraid and anxious.

“You alright dude?”

“Uh,” the kid says, his eyes quivering as he looks around the store, like it has an answer to his problem hidden somewhere in it, the stark grayish blue of them almost alarming when they settle finally on Jean, “I think…”

He seems to trail off then, his voice tight and his eyes filling with what looks to be unshed tears. Jean feels a whole new wave of panic, but this kid just doesn’t seem fucked up, it doesn’t fit. He’s dealt with it before, wasters that come in looking for freebies or a place to loiter, but usually you can just tell when someone’s on something.

“Hey, just use my phone, it’s alright,” Jean says, trying his best to keep his voice as reassuring as possible, handing over his phone. The kid seems to ponder it for a second, thinks about it, and then relents with a frustrated hiss, grabbing his hair again and turning to look towards the door.

“I can’t. What time do the buses start around here?”

Jean laughs a little, turning to look at the clock just to make sure it definitely still is after 2 in the morning, and then says, “There aren’t any, not around here.”

The kid turns then, finally lets his hands slip out of his pockets to lay limp at his side, looks more defeated than anything else. His eyes are shocking, like the color of frozen stone, and Jean has always been weak to the ones that look the most lost - it’s a bad habit of his, one of many.

“You couldn’t give me a ride, could you?”

\--

Eren, the kid’s name apparently is, is actually only two years younger than Jean. He’s 18 and _“not from here”_ , which is all the backstory Jean thinks he’s gonna get. He sits with Jean for the rest of the 45 minutes of his shift, first timidly wandering the empty store, and then leaning on the counter to be a nosy little shit.

“What are you reading on your phone?” he inquires, using his elbows to lean as far into Jean’s personal space as possible.

Jean jerks the phone back, cursing beneath his breath when it notifies him again that it’s low on battery. “Forums,” he answers vaguely.

“What kind of forums?” Eren persists.

“Music.”

“Oh,” Eren says, pondering this for a moment, and then he perks up a little. “Are you in a band?”

“No,” Jean replies, because trying to explain a near obsessive fascination with J-pop seems a little too revealing for someone he’s just met. But it’s Nocchi’s birthday today, and the people on here always do the strangest shit for the birthdays of people they’ll never meet. Jean finally locks his phone over an image of a man eating cake with a photograph of her, trying not to seem too amused by it.

“Could you float me some free coffee?”

Jean quirks a brow, eyeing the burnt sludge that’s been sitting there since before his shift started at 7pm.

“If you’re brave enough to drink that shit, help yourself. It’ll only end up down the drain when Mona gets in.”

“Who’s Mona?” Eren yells, unnecessarily loud for only being an extra foot farther away than he was before, pouring the stale coffee into a small cup.

“Coworker, she’s on shift after me. I can drive you to Wal-mart when she clocks in.”

“Cool,” Eren says, making enough of a face when he takes a sip to have Jean laughing, “Thank you for doing this, again.”

“It’s whatever,” Jean shrugs, “I live down that way anyway.”

“So how did you end up working here?” Eren asks, emphasis on the ‘here’, as if Jean needs reminding that he has a shitty job. He still looks a little nervous, but talking seems to be enough of a distraction for him, so Jean plays along.

“I dropped out of high school, so. Stay in school, I guess.”

Eren looks down at the floor then, kicking lightly at the shitty plywood of the counter with the rubber toe of his sneaker. “Little late for that,” he mumbles, and Jean assumes he wasn’t meant to hear, so he doesn’t ask.

By the time Mona comes in, Eren is an anxious ball of tension again - his hands fisted in pockets, chewing on his lips, his eyes darting around. Mona gives him a look like he’s Jean’s redheaded stepchild, but Jean isn’t that close to her, so he doesn’t really give much of a shit what she thinks. For all she knows this could be his friend, waiting for his shift to be over so they could go and do… friend-shit together.

Some people actually have those - friends. Mona probably doesn’t.

\--

In the car Eren has a serious case of the jitters. It only takes about 5 minutes to get to Wal-mart, but when Jean pulls up under the flickering light of the sign at the front door, Eren just looks down at his jumping knee like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He even ignored the embarrassing blast of music from Jean's speakers, leftover from his ride on the way in to work earlier in the evening.

“Are you running from the cops?” Jean asks, because he thinks it’s a fair question, at least now he’s proven his word is good for it.

“Not really?” Eren laughs, though it’s more of a forceful exhale.

“I can’t help you out if you don’t tell me,” Jean says, because he’s seen this tactic used before. A promise for a reveal, tit for tat. He saw it on Cops once, or something, which is why he thinks of it now. Eren doesn’t seem like a criminal though, and it’s the same sort of instinctual assumption that has Jean convinced he isn’t a tweaking fuckhead either. He just looks like a lost, scared kid.

“I need the phone to call my sister,” Eren says, rubbing his jaw with his shaking hand, and then leaning on his elbow to look up at the Wal-mart sign like it’s some kind of a challenge.

“Use mine, then,” Jean offers again, but Eren shakes his head.

“I can’t. I need one I can toss, I don’t want them tracing it.”

Jean thinks about laughing, but then feels the cold slither of possibility hit his gut like dropping a wet cloth.

“Why would someone want to trace a phone call to your sister?” Jean asks, pitching his voice more serious this time, more commanding adult then scared 20 year old.

“Can we just. Stop for a second.”

Jean looks around, at the very empty parking lot, at the entrance to the store they’ve been parked in front of for nearly 10 minutes.

“We’ve _been_ stopped. Tell me how you got to my store, at least, dude.”

Eren’s head makes a quiet thunk as it falls back against the headrest of Jean’s old Volvo. He looks up at the ceiling of the car, and sighs so dramatically that it almost makes Jean smile - oh, to be a teenager again, says his extra year of experience in his twenties.

“I hitched. Told the guy to drop me when he turned off the highway.”

“And where was that?” Jean asks, ignoring the urge to ask if the dude touched him, because it seems wildly inappropriate, even if it is the first jolt of worry that enters his mind. The kid is cute, that's all.

“I dunno. Took me a little while to reach your store.”

Eren seems so much more relaxed once he gets talking, once Jean is asking him questions and making him rationalize his own answers. For some insane reason, the thought of dumping him here to go twitch and aimlessly walk his way through the aisles of Wal-mart searching for a phone he probably can’t afford seems almost cruel. The blue-white light from the sign for the store hits Eren’s face at the right angle to have part of his jaw covered in shadow, but the rest of him looks so young, so illuminated and real. Somehow it makes him seem more trustworthy, even though Jean knows anyone else would proclaim him off of his fucking head at this point for thinking so.

“I’ll take you to my place if you promise to tell me what happened,” Jean offers, pointing his finger like he’s scolding. Eren kinda smirks at it, like he’s amused, and the face he makes goes right to Jean’s stomach. _No_ , that isn’t why he’s doing this, he tells himself. “And you’ll use my fucking phone, okay? Nobody is gonna trace shit.”

Eren goes all doe-eyed and kind of stricken with awe when he realizes Jean is serious. Not in a scared way either, though this only makes Jean wonder about the guy he hitchhiked with, but more like he’s grateful.

“Okay,” Eren says, taking a deep breath or two. “Do you have food?” he asks shortly after.

Jean leans over to ruffle Eren’s stupid, thick hair, the tips of his fingers tingling at the sound of Eren’s laughter

“You’ll bleed me dry before the night’s up,” Jean says, as if coffee and company ever cost anything, as if he doesn’t live down this way too, completely alone.

Eren just grins and says, “Those could be famous last words. I could be packin’” - which only makes Jean laugh, and turn back away from staring at the passenger seat of his car, turning out of the parking lot.

“Don’t be a brat,” he says, without really meaning it.

\--

Jean takes Eren to his apartment, and the walk up to it is surreal - the hazy glow from the porch lights illuminating the concrete and the side of Eren’s face closest to Jean - in another world this would be familiar, or it feels almost that way now.

The minute they get through the door, Eren gets jittery again. His leg bounces, he’s pushing his lip with his fingers to bite on the inside of it, he’s pacing around the living room, saying random shit looks nice. And again, this is the kind of thing that should make Jean nervous, but it doesn’t, and all Jean can do is say, “sorry for the mess. Wasn’t expecting company.”

“It’s okay,” Eren mumbles with his lip still stuck between his teeth, kicking at an empty can of Mountain Dew that must've fallen to the ground from the coffee table, “Do you have a smoke?”

“I quit smoking,” Jean says, half glancing around to see if he’d forgotten an ashtray somewhere that Eren spotted. “I vape, though.”

“Vape?” Eren asks, turning and dropping his hand from his mouth, finally, “The hell is that?”

Jean walks into his room, kicks off his shoes along the way, and then comes out with his clearomizer. The ecig part is embarrassingly pink, which makes the whole contraption look rather childish, but it was the last one they had with adjustable battery voltage.

Eren points to the thing when Jean emerges with it. “That looks like Paris Hilton’s meth pipe.”

Jean laughs, despite himself, and demonstrates, inhaling while holding down the illuminated button. When he exhales a steady stream of smoke-like vapor Eren looks adorably confused.

“It’s just oil vapor,” he explains, handing it over to Eren, “Hold the button to take a hit.”

Eren does, except he inhales it immediately and rather swiftly chokes. Jean takes it from him, apologizing, and guiding Eren to the couch while he runs to get water. Once Jean hands him a glass and he’s chugged just about half of it, he seems to regain some of his voice.

“Sorry I can’t offer you a real smoke,” Jean says, though he isn’t, really. He doesn’t miss the smell of it stinking up his apartment.

“S’okay,” Eren says, and then his knee is bouncing again, his hands fiddling with the zip on his hoodie.

It’s nearing 4am now, and Jean is getting about as tired as he usually is, but Eren still seems wide awake. Jean lounges back against the couch, stuck just before that place where lack of sleep makes you unnaturally alert, and it finally hits him that he doesn’t really have a plan - doesn’t know if he’s offering Eren a place to sleep, or what. He figures he’s gone this far, he deserves to know _something_.

“So, you gonna tell me what you did to get the cops not-really after you?” Jean asks, keeping his voice somewhat playful, his head lolling to the side on the back of the couch to look at him.

Eren shrugs, bunches up his shoulders like he might just ignore the question, but then it all falls out of him like someone cutting the bottom off a water balloon.

“I beat up a kid in school, bashed his face right in. His parents are pressing charges, they kept screaming it at me until I left, that I’m going away for a long time because of this. Fucked up his face so bad, man, the nurse said he might need reconstructive surgery because of it.”

The blatant self-hatred written all over Eren’s face tells Jean he isn’t joking, or even exaggerating. That whatever he did to this kid was bad enough to regret, and heavy enough to feel like he had to run away from it.

“So you just… left?”

“I had to, it’s just my mom and my sister now. My sister’s adopted, my dad left us all 6 years ago. My mom can’t afford a lawyer, I couldn’t stay and wait to watch her heart get broken again.”

It’s ridiculous that the notion of Eren being capable of causing extreme bodily harm isn’t what Jean is worried about. What he’s worried about is the way his stone-like eyes quiver when he looks down at his hands, like he wants to cry but doesn’t feel he’s allowed.

“You should call your sister. They won’t trace that phone call, but you need to let her know you’re okay.”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Eren mutters, wiping at his mouth, and then looking up towards the chipped paint on Jean’s ceiling. “Nice place you got,” he comments unnecessarily, and Jean scoffs at the obvious dodge, “How long have you lived on your own?”

“Few years now.”

“Shit, how do you do it? You can’t be much older than me.”

Jean shrugs, suddenly feeling the sort of muted hero-worship he’s been the focus of all night is entirely unworthy. “Like I said, dropped out of school, got the first job I could find.”

Eren cocks his head cutely, like Jean is speaking another language. The fact Jean immediately thinks of the gesture as ‘cute’ is troublesome. “Why did you drop out anyway?”

“Uh,” Jean begins, suddenly wishing he had his ecig instead of it being abandoned on the side table near Eren, “I just never felt good enough.”

Eren frowns, pulling a leg beneath him and sitting half cross-legged, facing Jean. “Good enough for what?”

Jean laughs quietly. “That’s a good question, when I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

Eren _tsk_ ’s in teenage annoyance, and then diverts the topic once more to something completely irrelevant and borderline ADHD.

“Do you always have to wear that dumb shirt?” he asks, leaning forward a little to flick the stiff collar of Jean’s red and white striped work polo.

“When I work, yeah,” Jean says, glancing down at himself. “Not sure if I’m offended by your comment, or flattered you think this shirt is too dumb for me.”

Eren scoffs, a gesture too wise for his age. “I think that _job_ is too dumb for you.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, easy.”

“Why’s that?” Jean finds himself genuinely curious.

“Because you just look better than that, okay?”

Jean scoffs this time, “I didn’t realize there was a look.”

“Yeah, you did, come on,” Eren says, shifting and leaning closer, like they’re telling secrets, “Look at Mona, she only had, like, four teeth and she’s probably no more than twice my age.”

Jean nods a little, sagely. “Teeth cost money we don’t get paid.”

Eren looks slightly appalled. “You’ve got teeth, dude, what the fuck?”

Jean laughs, cringing at how dorky it sounds when he isn’t paying attention, trying to keep it down. “Alright, fine. Basic hygiene, I get it.”

“It’s not just that,” Eren persists, and the tiny wrinkle of determination between his brows is damn near devastatingly adorable, and Jean _knows_ why he invited him back here and feels ashamed for refusing to acknowledge it until now. “Why did you even drop out? Since you’re all about being honest and shit.”

“I told you-”

“No you didn’t,” Eren interrupts. “You said you didn’t feel good enough. You don’t just wake up one day not feeling good enough, something had to have happened.”

“I’ve felt like that since I was a kid, alright?” Jean says, a little snappy as he’s not in the mood to be interrogated about this right now, he’s not the one who’s on the run here. “Since my best friend died, and I realized that he deserved to live more than me.”

“Wow…” Eren’s eyes go wide.

“Shit, sorry.”

“No, wait. So you think you don’t deserve the life you were born into because someone else lost theirs?” Eren asks, and the condescending bite to his tone hurts a little, but there’s a harsh truth hidden there. Jean is good at ignoring those, usually.

“Sort of? He was a good kid, deserved the world.”

Eren leans back, huffing out a seemingly shocked exhale, looking at Jean like he’d just vehemently disagreed with him on some sort of political alignment or something, not just bared a tiny piece of his soul to a stranger. There’s a heavy, foreboding silence that settles over them for a second or two, but Eren breaks it when he says, “I’m sorry your friend died.”

Jean settles a little, lowers his hackles, and is ready to say ‘it’s okay’, but Eren quickly tacks on, “-but that’s such a huge load of bullshit.”

“ _What_?”

“You can’t just say you don’t deserve the life you have, that isn’t up to you,” Eren preaches.

“Are you high? This is all really rich coming from someone who’s essentially running the fuck away from his problems right now,” Jean snaps.

Eren only shrugs, the nonchalance of it irritating. “At least I can admit it.”

“You are unreal, dude,” Jean mutters in quiet awe, shaking his head.

“Can we eat?” Eren half groans, diverting yet again.

“Jesus, you expect me to feed you now?”

“Would be nice,” Eren grins, leaning towards Jean again, and Jean is helpless to it, smiles right back at him. Unreal isn’t quite the word - intense, maybe.

“Fine,” he says, standing up, and is quietly pleased when Eren follows.

Eren ends up munching on dry cereal, after hoisting himself up so that he’s sitting on Jean’s counter, much like the way it seemed like he wanted to back at the store. Jean settles for leftover Chinese food, which Eren makes a face at, and then eventually steals a bite of after snatching Jean’s wrist and pulling it towards his mouth.

“Are you always this obnoxious?” Jean asks, and Eren kind of smirks, like he’s decided to take it as a compliment.

“Only certain people are worth my time,” Eren says vaguely, and Jean rolls his eyes, chewing his own lip this time to keep from smiling again.

Eren tries to find a fork so he can steal more of Jean’s food from him, searching in the drawers at either sides of his knees, and then stops when he catches the one with all of Jean’s mother’s hand-knitted placemats and table settings.

Eren looks down into the drawer, closes it, and then looks back up at Jean with a confused frown.

“Are you gay?”

Jean chokes on his food. “What?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“And a personal one, what the fuck made you ask that?”

“I dunno, dude, the pink magic wand, the girly music in the car, the _doilies_.”

Eren looks like someone’s pressed pause on him, sitting and waiting for Jean’s response. Jean hesitates for as long as he thinks he’s allowed, wonders how revealing it can be when you just look at someone you’re attracted to, if the whole dilating pupils thing is true or not.

“Would it make a difference if I was?” he asks slowly.

“I think it would,” Eren says, “Considering I beat the shit out of that kid for that very reason.”

Jean’s blood runs cold, the feeling as sudden as dipping your hand into a bucket of ice water, too stunned to even move. All of this ridiculous strung out night, and he’s apparently invited a violent, homophobic high school senior into his apartment, one that he has gradually decided he very much likes the look of. Even now, his dark, deep set eyes, and the light smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose - Jean has always been good at making poor decisions.

“I don’t, uh, know how comfortable I am answering this,” Jean says.

It’s about as good as a yes, which doesn’t explain why Eren’s eyes light up, why he looks almost relieved himself. Eren reaches forward in Jean’s tiny, plastic and plywood kitchen, and Jean’s stomach jumps halfway up through his ribs when Eren gets a good grip on the front of his work polo, tugging him forward to fit in between his knees on the counter.

“Just tell me,” Eren pleads, looking right at Jean, his eyes stark and unashamed, and the way his voice pitches lower seems to explain everything, “I won’t be offended.”

“Yeah,” Jean replies, whispering, “I am.”

“Good,” Eren says, and then he tugs Jean’s shirt forward again and kisses him.

It feels a little like the first drop of a roller coaster you’ve never ridden before, something you almost expect, but it still knocks the ground out from beneath you when it happens. The only sounds are the residential hum of the apartment building and the occasional squeak of Eren’s sneakers against the doors of his kitchen cupboards, but all Jean can really hear is breathing. His own breathing, stuttering gasps, and then Eren’s too. Eren’s mouth is so soft and wet, a pleasantly sloppy kisser, something so innately _high school_ about the whole thing that makes it all the more arousing, somehow.

And it just keeps happening. Eren kisses like he talks, all eager curiosity with a hint of selfishness, the small little bites he leaves behind on Jean’s lower lip nothing but a tease, and he knows it. Jean should pull away, but despite not wanting to, he wouldn’t even be able to - not with how Eren still has his shirt bunched in his fist, hoisting him as close as the counter between his legs will let them.

“Fuck,” Eren grunts, shoving Jean backwards suddenly enough to be startling, but then he’s hopping off the counter, and pushing Jean backwards into his fridge. He’s on his mouth again, almost immediately, and it takes a couple extra seconds to process, probably due the intoxicating wet heat of Eren’s tongue, that Eren is popping the button on his jeans, pulling down the zipper.

“Hey, hey, slow down,” Jean says, holding Eren’s face to pull him back far enough to speak, groaning audibly when Eren’s hand clumsily reaches right down into his trousers.

“You want me to stop?” Eren asks, like he knows the answer already.

“No,” Jean says, and then, “Is this too fast? I don’t know, fuck.”

Eren leans up on the balls of his feet, pushes their hips together so hard it’s almost painful, his own jeans undone and his hands still desperate to get to Jean’s skin. Eren rubs his thumb along the underside of Jean’s cock, and it’s all it takes for Jean’s head to thunk back against the fridge, chanting out, “Yeah, yeah, _fuck_.”

After a bit of a stumbling struggle, Eren tugs his own clothes down past his hips, lifting his shirt, and then tugs Jean’s trousers down as far as they’ll go without being undone. He looks up at Jean through his lashes, the few inches of height between them so much more obvious when Eren isn’t standing on his toes, and he licks obscenely at his palm before reaching down to grip them both.

“ _Hah_ , shit, _Eren_.”

Eren uses his free arm to reach around Jean’s neck, standing back up on the balls of his feet so they can kiss. Calling it a kiss is a stretch - it’s really more open mouthed panting, Eren’s togue occasionally licking into Jean’s mouth.

Eren makes a mess of his own hand once they’ve both come, and Jean shouldn’t be as surprised as he is that Eren decides to wipe both of their collective spunk on the front of his work t-shirt - but it still pulls a manly shriek from him anyway.

“Brat,” Jean says scoldingly, holding his damp shirt away from his stomach, and his heart does a little twirl when Eren leans up to kiss his cheek, the random burst of tender affection so unwarranted for where they are right now.

Eren saunters away from the kitchen, his legs all bowed and bambi-like when he tries to button himself up again while walking. Jean pulls his shirt over his head, avoiding smacking himself in the face with both of their cooling mess, and notices Eren picking up the ecig again for another attempt.

“Don’t inhale it so quick,” Jean says, walking towards his room, his shirt held in an outstretched arm as if it’s carrying a disease. Eren laughs at him. “Pull a drag into your mouth and then inhale slowly after, it’ll burn less.”

Jean changes into another t-shirt, an old one that’s faded from his skating days, and he doesn’t hear Eren coughing so he assumes he figured it out. When Jean emerges from his room he finds Eren all sprawled out comfortably on the couch, his hoodie discarded on the back of it.

He takes a seat next to him, and then hisses when he takes a look at Eren’s hands - his knuckles are bruised, some of them busted open.

“Jesus, you need to get this looked at.”

“Isn’t so bad,” Eren mumbles, and then he looks like he regrets taking his hoodie off.

“Why did you beat that kid up?” Jean asks then, thinking he figured out the answer but not entirely sure of it.

“Because he called me a shirt lifting fag," Eren says, and all Jean can think of is the way he pulled his hoodie and tshirt up his stomach so he could look down at the space between them earlier, “Said it made sense since I only grew up with girls.”

“Shit,” Jean says, in a weak show of sympathy. He would run his thumbs over Eren’s sore knuckles in comfort, if he didn’t think it would hurt.

“I regret it though, I do.”

Jean leans forward to kiss Eren, with his mouth closed, chaste and full of the comfort he can’t give by holding hands. Eren grabs him as he leans backwards, pulls him in and licks apart the seam of his lips like he’s hungry for the taste of his mouth. By the time they pull away though, Eren’s knee is bouncing again, and he immediately goes back to chewing on his own, now kiss-swollen, lips.

Jean sighs, tired and somewhat overwhelmed, running a hand over his face. “You really need to call your sister.”

“Fine. Gimme your phone.”

The immediate admission shocks Jean, enough to have him fumble a little when he realizes Eren has his hand held out, waiting. He hands Eren his phone, tells him his lock screen code of _0616_ , and then Eren immediately stands and walks into Jean’s room, shutting the door behind him.

Jean takes a few long drags of his vapor, because he thinks he’s deserved that much.

\--

When Eren emerges he looks infinitely younger somehow, his shoulders hunched and his expression shuttered. He hands Jean back his phone and plops to the couch, and only when Jean takes it from him does he notice that it’s after 5am now, the sun creeping up around the edges of the horizon behind the haze of his dirty windows.

“She wants me to come home,” he mumbles dejectedly.

“Of course she does.”

Eren looks down at his lap still, picking at the seam of his jeans. “She says she’ll drive halfway to pick me up.”

“Tell her not to, I’ll drive you, it’s okay. Where do you live, anyway?”

“Westcott,” Eren says, looking up at Jean like he’s waiting to get yelled at.

“Westcott, like, North Westcott?”

Eren nods, and Jean deflates a little. It’s a three and a half hour drive away. Jean assumed he wasn’t local, not from having hitchhiked, but that seems almost unfairly far.

“Right, well,” Jean says, his chest constricting in this ridiculous sadness that shouldn’t be apparent for a boy you’ve only just met - even if you did just allow him to jerk you off in your kitchen. “We should get going then. Tell your sister not to worry, it’s too early to be driving southbound, she’ll get stuck in traffic anyway.”

Eren nods, and the way he slumps back into his hoodie when he stands makes it seem like he’s trying to hide again, a dog with its tail between its legs.

\--

The ride towards Eren’s home is solemn and a little quiet. After Eren texts his sister from Jean’s phone that she doesn’t need to meet him, he’s on his way, he settles back into his seat and falls asleep. Jean doesn’t dare put any music on, the tender downturn to Eren’s mouth as he sleeps enough of a deterrent to waking him, but it doesn’t feel lonely, exactly. Just quiet, like airports when you catch a redeye flight, or the convenience store when Jean works late enough to watch the sun come up.

It’s coming up now, even, burning bright over the horizon, the sky painted pale blue. The early morning glow hits Eren’s face in a way that makes his eyelashes have shadows, cast towards the side, moving with every little turn of the car. The highway is long and straight, and it’s the only way Jean can justify safely looking over at him every so often. Jean blames lack of sleep for being so inundated with sappy nostalgia - it even goes so far as to having him wonder what Marco would think of Eren, and how he might not even have met the kid if Marco hadn’t died, in a roundabout kind of way.

\--

Jean uses his phone to navigate the residential streets of Westcott, jumping a little when the phone talks at him, scrambling to mute the damn thing. He punches in the address Eren wrote down earlier, and only once he’s pulled up in front of a pale grey house does he lean over to gently shake Eren’s shoulders until he’s awake.

“Hey, we’re here,” he says softly.

Eren jolts up, blinking the sleep away from his eyes, the world around them now much brighter at nearly 9am than it was when he’d fallen asleep. He stares blearily at Jean for a moment, glances towards his house, and then when he looks back to Jean his eyes well up, almost immediately.

“What if I never see you again?” Eren asks, his voice tight on a whisper, and Jean’s stomach feels like it’s falling.

“Hey, it’s okay, you’ll see me again,” he promises, though he isn’t sure that’s true. It doesn’t look like Eren has a car, and his minimum wages won’t be able to afford the continuous gas it would take to drive out here. But Eren is sleepy and afraid, and slightly delirious, and he looked so comfortable before Jean woke him up, it makes him feel more than a little responsible.

“Promise?” Eren says, holding out his pinky, which Jean tugs at with his own, and then kisses his swollen knuckle.

“Promise.”

Eren turns to leave, and Jean catches sight of a tall girl with shoulder length dark hair watching from the windows. It’s seeing her, another human being, someone outside of the little bubble they’d wrapped around themselves for the night, that checks Jean back into reality - that Eren really is leaving the car, going home, and Jean has another 3 hour drive to do until he can finally sleep.

“Wait,” he says, tugging on the arm of Eren’s hoodie to stop him from leaving just yet. “Don’t let those fuckers bully you, alright? If they call you a fag again, just shrug it off, or own it. Tell them yeah, you are, and you’ve got an older boyfriend who’d love to show them where they can fucking stick it.”

Eren smiles, his eyes still a little wet as he sniffles. “Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of not letting them get to me?”

“Not if it’s me,” Jean says, lifting his hand from Eren’s arm to wipe a stray tear from his cheek. “Get some sleep.”

“Thank you,” Eren says, and Jean is quietly relieved he doesn’t clarify for what.

Once Eren is inside it’s like the rest of the world picks up volume, the birds chirping in their usual morning glee, cars zooming past him to get out of the residential area. Jean watches as the dark haired girl pulls Eren into a hug, and then pulls away from the curb, trying to decide whether or not he needs coffee for the ride home.

\--

By the time Jean gets back home it’s nearly lunchtime. He’d stopped twice on the way, once for coffee (which he deeply regretted when the minor jolt of caffeine slipped right off his back like ice on a hot skillet) and then once for McDonald’s breakfast, which felt like the best thing he’d ever put in his mouth, until he remembered what exactly he was doing almost 6 hours earlier.

He’s walking dead when he gets to his apartment, each stair towards the front door like lifting lead bricks, and by the time he’s in his bedroom he only just manages to kick off his shoes, dropping to his bed fully clothed.

Jean is a blink away from sleep when a series of three rapidly successive vibrations pulls him back towards the living from his pocket. When he looks at his phone he sees three unread messages from a number he doesn’t have saved. He opens them.

 

_'1/3_   
_it’s eren, i took your number from mikasa’s phone. were you serious about what u said? i take promises very seriously. i want to see u again, soon pls. i slept for 3 hours then woke up convinced that i dreamed u up, i even (cont)_

_2/3_   
_looked up bus routes to ur part of town. u were right, there aren’t any. we can figure it out, right? how will i get my older boyfriend here to defend me? at least u have a car lol. thank u for last night, or tonight? i think i might have (cont)_

_3/3_   
_done something stupid if u hadn’t taken me in. i miss u, i wish i could feel u. doesn’t feel real. when you wake up, let me know ur real, ok? you promised me. xo eren'_

 


End file.
